Sample - "How to Science Your Way Off Mars" First Draft (Patreon)

Some of you may be aware that I recently did a Kickstarter for a Maretian hardcopy edition (not the first, but the first American-printed one).

One of the add-ons is a commentary book, "How to Science Your Way Off Mars," which is basically the scientific underpinnings behind both my fan fiction and the original novel it celebrates.

This is part of what will be chapter 1- the first draft. Having written this, I need to do a bit of research in actual libraries to make sure what I've written here isn't bullshit. If it is, I'll make changes, and even if it isn't I'll likely add stuff from my reading.

Nevertheless, this is the general tone of what the book will be like. And, at the moment, this is my top writing priority, because people have already paid for this. If and when I share more from this, it'll be member-locked. And I won't be sharing all of it, because... well... limited edition Kickstarter.

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So, let’s begin with the most fundamental basis of the story: that two universes exist in close proximity along a fifth-dimensional axis, each of which has intelligent species which are not just biologically compatible but in many cases identical, and which have cultures close enough to one another as to be mutually intelligible once a language barrier is overcome. All of this is a TREMENDOUS ask. In fact, every individual item on the list requires an enormous suspension of disbelief if you take a second look at it. 

Of course, this suspension of disbelief is one we’ve grown accustomed to, especially in the past ten to twenty years. The concept of parallel worlds, originally formulated in the 1800s, has recently hit mainstream consciousness with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other mass market ventures like Everywhere Everything All At Once. The concept of intelligent alien life goes back to at least the 1600s. And creating fictional cultures to hold up a mirror to actual extant cultures was an old trick when Plato used it. Crossover fiction, in one form or another, is a thing we’ve long since forgotten to question. 

So... let’s question it. 

For example, would you like to know the scientific rationale behind the whole parallel dimensional worlds thing?

The mathematical solution which would produce a world with a different history than our own is equally as valid as our own.

And... that’s it. 

Nothing about the fifth dimension. Nothing about bifurcating timelines. Not even anything about the other world actually existing anywhere, in our universe or another. Just the recognition that having Napoleon destroy the Russian army before he got to Moscow, or Vercengeterix beheading Julius Caesar in Gaul, doesn’t break the math we’ve created in an attempt to explain the weirdness which is our universe.

The idea that universes exist in the same three-dimensional space, stacked on top of one another like a pile of papers in a spatial dimension we can’t see? Pure speculation. No verifiable experiment has ever demonstrated the existence of a fifth dimension. We get it from a couple of fairly weird schoolteachers and physicists, Edwin A. Abbott (writer of the novella Flatland in 1880, still worth a read today) and Charles Howard Hinton (who, among other and weirder things, wrote a fanfic sequel to Flatland almost thirty years later called How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension, much less readable).

And traveling from one dimension to another? Absolutely impossible. The equations we use to describe our universe’s physical laws simply don’t allow it.

Hell of a buzzkill, isn’t it?

Well, let me give you a bit of comfort before we leave hard science and tackle this topic via philosophy.

The first thing any competent and ethical scientist will tell you is that all the scientific laws, equations, theorems, or whatever that we use to understand our world begin in our own, human, entirely local and fallible observations. They are guesses- extremely good guesses, repeatedly tested by many different people in many different ways, the best guess we can make with the data we have to work with- but they are still guesses. And, like any guess, it is possible that one or more than one of them is wrong- possibly even fundamentally wrong.

This is an extremely difficult concept for a layman to accept. To the kind of mind that insists that all questions must have one and only one correct answer, the idea that a right answer can change is outside common sense. A lot of people, when they hear that science has changed its collective mind on something, does not see it as a triumph of the scientific method, but as an indictment. Science was wrong. How can we trust science’s answers now?

The thing is, science is not a person, or a group, or an organization. It is, first and foremost, a process, and the goal of the process is to test a guess by eliminating every source of bias or preconception- in other words, humans doing experiments designed so that humans are eliminated from the final process.

Because humans are the problem. Humans know things for fact which just aren’t true sometimes. Humans have preconceived notions which have nothing to do with how the world actually works. Humans have blind spots, prejudices, and outright myths. And if you want to understand how the universe really works, you have to get rid of all those things. 

To quote Nobel Prize laureate and expert bongo player Richard Feynmann: “The first principle [of scientific integrity] is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool.”

So, for perfect science, you need to get rid of humans- and, of course, we can’t, which is why science requires experiments to be repeatable in different environments by different people using different approaches, With enough different people- with different biases, different cultures, different ways of thinking- any one particular scientist’s prejudices and errors can be compensated against.

Now, what does all of this have to do with traveling to parallel dimensions?

Just this: the main reason our current laws of physics don’t allow for travel along, say, the fifth dimension, is that we’ve never observed anything doing it. 

We, as humans, perceive motion through three dimensions (height, length, breadth) and, very dimly, perceive a steady progression in one fixed direction along a fourth dimension (time). We simply don’t have the senses to detect any other directions by ourselves, and outside a few truly exotic theories (cosmic string theory being the most prominent) we can’t even begin to guess what that would look like from our mainly three-dimensional point of view. 

We don’t see things popping in and out of the fifth dimension. 

Probably- most probably- that’s because nothing can pop in and out of the fifth dimension.

But- just possibly- it’s only because we’re too sensory-limited, or just too oblivious, to see it happening. 

And until and unless we figure out how to see it, we’ll assume it’s impossible, and we’ll write our laws of physics around that assumption, never knowing it’s wrong.

Maybe.

There’s your ray of hope for visiting a magical kingdom of talking ungulates someday. Now let’s move on to the philosophy of parallel worlds.

So, for purposes of what follows, let’s assume a multiverse- uncountable layer upon layer of world after world, one where the Chicxulub asteroid missed Earth and dinosaurs got a stay of execution, one where Emperor Diocletian got backstabbed six months into his rule and the Roman Empire collapsed centuries early, one where a certain heart-shaped herb never went extinct and thus birth control never became a controversy, one where you had an omeletburger for breakfast last Tuesday instead of a sausage burrito, and so forth. 

Everything that could possibly happen anywhere, happens somewhere. 

Now ask... how, exactly, could that even work??

In most storytelling, at least, there’s a strong anthropocentric principle at work. (In science, the anthropic principle is that anything we observe in nature, and which we write physical laws to describe, must be consistent with us, that is human beings, existing in nature. Anthropocentric principle, also called the “strong” anthropic principle, which is much less scientific, holds that everything in nature exists as it does for the purpose of our existing- rather another way of saying that we create God in our own image.) Do you keep working your dead-end job, or do you start up that business you’ve been thinking about for years now? Whichever decision you choose, the storyteller says, creates a new dimension- this one, where you do, and that one, where you don’t.

For storytelling purposes it’s great, especially if you have a hero you want to torture- er, a hero you want to give life-changing learning experiences. 

But if you’re actually serious about describing a functional cosmos, it’s probably hokum.

Let’s simplify things way, way, WAAAY down. Let’s define universes by coin flips- say, that each universe is a series of a hundred random flips of a coin, heads or tails. So, one universe might be:

HHTTHTHHTTHHTHTHTHHTTHTTHHT...

... no, I’m not going to type it all out. You get the idea. 

If you keep doing this long enough, your list of 100-letter universes will begin to include universe with identical series. (In this simplification it’s going to happen pretty quick, since each flip only has two possible outcomes, if we ignore literal edge cases.) 

So, you get universe #47, which for its last twenty flips runs:

TTHTH HTHTT THHTH THHTH

And then you get universe #714, which is identical for its first eighty-seven flips- I mean flip for flip identical up until that point. Its final twenty flips would run:

TTHTH HTTHT HTHTT HHHTH

Six hundred sixty-three complete runs of coin-flips separate universe #47 and #714. Yet the two universes are identical up to a point, after which they noticeably diverge. 

Did the coin make a decision on the eighty-eighth flip in universe #47 that created universe #714? No, of course not. These are two completely randomized universes which just happened to be the same up to a point. One did not cause the other in any way. 

“But,” you might ask, “if we scale this up to all the complexity of actual universes, how could pure random chance result in two perfectly identical universes up to the point where I, for example, choose the omeletburger over the sausage burrito? The odds against it must be so close to zero as makes no difference! One MUST branch from the other!”

Well, no. Remember, we’re postulating, as our starting point, infinite worlds occupying the same three-dimensional space. And when you’re talking about infinities, all possibilities, no matter how tiny, become inevitabilities. If the number of parallel universes is truly infinite, then there must, by definition, be at least one universe where you chose the omeletburger AND at least one universe where you chose the sausage burrito.

Actually, there are infinite numbers of each dimension, because infinity is a totally broken concept. But that’s a fifty-five gallon drum full of worms, so let’s put that aside for now and stay focused on parallel worlds instead.

If you want to be in any way serious about parallel worlds as a concept beyond just a plot device for a story, you need to dump the whole concept of a main character, be it you or an astronaut or an Asian-American housewife or a violet-colored unicorn with obsessive tendencies. The choices of one person do not define a universe (except possibly for identification purposes by an outside observer). What defines a universe are all the choices, or coin-flips, or whatever, that got it to the point of divergence in the first place.

Does that mean you don’t have free will? Well, that’s another oil drum full of worms. For purposes of this discussion, I’ll say no, but that your exercise of free will is defined by the person you are in the decision-making moment- and the you who chose the sausage burrito is not the same as the you who chose the omeletburger. 

Maybe Egg Sandwich You had a cold and didn’t feel their stomach could handle pork sausage first thing in the morning. Maybe Breakfast Taco You got runny egg on their shirt the last time they had the omeletburger and didn’t want a repeat performance. Maybe one of them was saving up for something and chose one or the other because it was on sale. Or maybe the person running the drive-thru told you there’d be a five-minute wait for the omeletburger, and you ordered it anyway, because dammit, you’ve had enough sausage burritos and you’re not going to settle for that crap today, because you deserve better.

All of these are decisions which you would perceive as free will, but all of them are also dependent on prior conditions, not all of them under your control. Each of them is a slightly different person from the others- all still quite recognizable as you, or as An You, but not quite identical one to another. 

We may steer our own fate, but we did not steer the formation of the We which is steering our own fate.

But to get back to parallel worlds, let’s talk about positioning. In our coin-flip example, the two mostly-identical runs were hundreds of runs apart. But, in an every-difference-creates-a-new-universe model, the later the change occurs, the closer together the universes would be. So, which is it?

Well, if we reject the idea of the branching-multiverse model and instead use the all-universes-have-a-full-history model, like the coin flip example, then there’s absolutely no reason whatever why two near-identical universes would be anywhere close to each other on our hypothetical fifth-dimensional axis. Not to belabor a point, but infinity is literally unbelievably large. The coin flips coming up the same way twice might happen in quick succession... or they could be separated by a vast number of wildly different runs.

And that infinity brings up even more weirdness. Technically, not only could the difference in universes be as small as one atom intercepting a photon that hit a different atom in another... but it would be perfectly feasible to find alternate universes that are perfectly identical, because the point of divergence- the first difference in the run of coin flips- has not happened yet (from our limited three-dimensional point of view). 

And then there’s something that could only come up in a truly infinite multiverse; not divergent realities, but convergent realities. Try to imagine, if you would, universes where two Earths have WILDLY different histories- for example, one where our Moon was born in a protoplanetary collision 4.4 billion years ago, and another where the Moon is a wandering planetoid only captured by Earth just in time to be the cause of the end of the dinosaurs. (Which I prefer to the idea of the Moon being an egg, thank you so much for both options, Doctor Who.) Yet in both worlds everything comes together, and there is a you in each, in the same country in each, and each of you is deciding what to order for breakfast at the drive-thru.

Only in an infinite multiverse, where any probability, no matter how much it runs against entropy, can happen, is such a thing as convergent realities even possible. 

(Incidentally, the whole idea of parallel Earths doesn’t originate with theories of parallel dimensions. It comes from the idea that, since space is infinite (by the way, it isn’t), then there is a star system out there where Hitler won World War 2, because if anything can happen, then everything does happen. There are all sorts of problems with this, the biggest being that it shows just how greatly human imagination undersells the staggering variety of stars, worlds, and other phenomena by just assuming every solar system has an Earth. But the concept made for a lot of interesting morality plays, looking at you, Star Trek.)

So, long story short: an infinite multiverse is an absolute mess. You have no way of knowing what you’re going to get from jump to jump.

And that begs the question: if you found a way to jump from universe to universe, how far would you have to jump?

And would that distance remain constant, or are these alternate worlds not as “parallel” as the name implies?

Let’s go back to geometry. Suppose a line- not a Euclidian abstract concept of infinite length and perfect straightness, but a drawn line on a piece of paper. The question is: what is the shortest possible distance you could travel along it? Indeed, what is the shortest possible distance which could be called a distance at all? Is it the width of a hydrogen atom (almost the smallest thing that we know has a fixed and measurable distance)? Is it the distance between electron shells of some larger atom, the distance of a quantum jump? (Yes, that’s how the term is defined; a quantum jump or quantum leap is not a gigantic movement, but just an electron either gaining or losing a photon and thereby rising up or down from one electron shell- “orbit”- to another.) Or is it something even smaller, like a neutrino or a quark?

Well, let’s say that it’s a hydrogen atom, purely for convenience. Point A is on one side of the orbit of its single electron, and point B is on the other. That is 1.06 X 10-10 meters, or put another way, 0.000000000106 meters. If you somehow glued a row of hydrogen atoms, electron to electron, along a meter stick, you’d have just under ten billion of the little things lined up there (and also one hell of a case of eyestrain).

Now, suppose that the line is not in Euclidian two-dimensional space, or our three-ish dimensional perception, but along a fifth spatial dimension, the one where all our alternate universes are piled up like sheets of paper. Say that each of those universes, in the fifth dimension, is only one hydrogen atom wide. (If narrower, we’d have no hope of touching the other dimensions, and if wider that infinity of other worlds would become rather unreasonable to handle on God’s desktop.)

The thickness of an American nickel coin is 1.95 millimeters, or 0.00195 meters. 

In that thickness, if it were twisted into the fifth dimension, a little less than nineteen million universes would fit.

If, that is, universes only have a fifth-dimensional width of a hydrogen atom- which is a large- or tiny- well, of tremendous scale either way- if.

There’s certainly no reason why universes should have a uniform fifth-dimensional thickness at all. An equally valid viewpoint might be that, as our universe is expanding in the three spatial dimensions, it is also expanding in this fifth dimension, at a comparable rate. (Which would rather quash any hope of reaching the next dimension over unless we develop some truly extreme long-distance teleportation technology.) Another might be that universes grow thicker or thinner in relation to mass distortions at the relevant points in congruent three-dimensional space. (Thicker where there is mass, or where mass is lacking? You could argue either way.)

But, believe it or not, there is quite definitely a reason why parallel universes, if they exist, would need to exist cheek to jowl. That reason is this: so far as we are aware, there is no such thing as matter, or energy, or time, or space, outside of a universe. The very concept of distance, regardless of which dimension it’s measured in, requires that a universe exist. 

Let’s say you have a gap between two universes. What’s in it? Not a universe. That means there is no space. It has, by definition, zero width, or length, or breadth. And, therefore, it also has zero fifth-dimensiondth. Which means... you don’t have a gap between those two universes. The only way you would get a gap would be by slotting a third universe (or more- they’re small!) between them.

Sadly, that little thought experiment might actually be the strongest argument against parallel universes existing at all. If there are an infinite number of alternate universes- or even just one- then, barring some unknown and unknowable meta-space that substitutes for the kind of space we know, they or it exist directly next to, and tangent to, our universe, for the simple reason that there is noplace else it can be.

And if our universe is next to another, and our universe is expanding, there ought to be some signs of contact, of back-pressure, or even of interpenetration. (Which last, by the way, would be Bad.)

No phenomenon we have as yet witnessed in the universe is compatible with such a cause.

Which is a little sad, so let’s ignore that and go back to pure philosophy one more time in regards to parallel worlds- specifically, for whittling down that infinity of worlds to something more manageable. 

In theory, you could technically have alternate universes whose point of difference lies in the Big Bang itself, the theoretical moment when the singularity that spawned all our matter, energy, time and space unraveled and coalesced, and in the process “selected” the physical forces we recognize today- the strong atomic force, the weak atomic force, electromagnetism, gravity, and (maybe) dark energy. (No, we’re not adding magic, not for this conversation. Later.)

The idea of tweaking the laws of physics between universes has been speculated about for many decades. Unfortunately for the speculators, scientists have conducted computer models of the Big Bang and later implementing some very basic, even small, tweaks to the big four physical forces (dark energy being too disputed and theoretical for that treatment as yet). And they found that, if you move more than the tiniest bit away from the natural laws we currently have, not only does life become impossible, but the universe as we know it becomes impossible. 

Weaken gravity slightly? The universe flies apart almost instantly, too fast for matter to coalesce. Strengthen it? The Big Bang very quickly reverses itself and goes Big Crunch. Take the brakes off photons? Time itself unravels. Weaken the strong atomic force? Neutrons fail to form, meaning no stable matter aside from hydrogen. Strengthen the weak atomic force? Nuclear fusion fails, which means no stars and no elements between (at heaviest) lithium and dwarf star matter. One way or another, even small tweaks, according to the models, result in either life becoming impossible or the universes themselves becoming unviable in one fashion or another. 

If alternate worlds are infinitely numerous, then a smaller infinity of them are stillborn.

So, if parallel universes exist at all, it is extremely likely that most of them will have identical or nearly identical physical laws to our own. Indeed, likelihood- or, to use a more scientific word, probability- is key to which alternate worlds we are most likely to encounter. 

Certain people, in talking about the nature of time, have said that treating it as a dimension like the spatial dimensions is a mistake. Time, they say, is merely a consequence of the universe changing according to what is the most probable outcome. I personally don’t know enough either of the underlying science or of philosophy to make an argument on that hypothesis, but it seems to me the rule could be applied to parallel worlds: the more probable an outcome is, the more likely it is to exist as a world parallel to our own.

Granted, no particular world is especially probable. We speak of a royal flush as the rarest hand in poker (assuming no wild cards). But there are four ways to get a royal flush- one for each suit of cards. But specify any five particular cards- whether it be a royal heart flush or a nine-high off-suit with all four suits represented- and there’s only one way to get that hand. But there are lots of one-pair hands, and even more king-high hands. 

So, if we abandon coin-flip worlds for more complex probabilities, we actually do find the world clusters that the coin-flip model lacks- clusters around high-probability universal outcomes. Such worlds may not all be gathered in a row, but there will be so many of them that they will crowd out the lower-probability worlds, leading to the same apparent cluster effect.

Is Earth, as we know it today, a high probability outcome? We have no way of knowing, since we have access to only one run of the cards. For all we know royal flushes are junk hands and nine-high off-suits are desirable. 

But from a storytelling perspective, treating Earth as a high probability is useful.

So we postulate parallel worlds, mostly like our own to such an extent that we can understand not just the cosmos of each, but the Earth or equivalent in each, its geology, its geography, its people and its cultures. 

And, at least as a plot device, you can visit Sausage Burrito You and Omeletburger You and tell them to go get breakfast somewhere else, because quite frankly, both of those suck.